Wikileaks' domain down as DNS provider pulls plug

Emma Woollacott, 3rd December 2010

Wikileaks' website has vanished altogether from the internet, following the decision of Everydns.net to terminate support.

The California-based company dropped Wikileaks late last night. It says its decision was not related to calls from the US government, but instead to the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to which Wikileaks has been subject recently.

"More specifically, the services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that 'Member shall not interfere with another Member’s use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services'," says Everydns in a statement.

"The interference at issues arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites."

The move leaves the wikileaks.org website offline for the time being, following Amazon's decision three days ago to terminate hosting services.

Wikileaks can still be accessed via its IP address, http://88.80.13.160/ and a number of other mirror sites, and the company is believed to be in talks with other providers.

The move comes as a group of US senators call for legislation making it illegal to publish the names of informants to the US military.

"Our foreign representatives, allies, and intelligence sources must have the clear assurance that their lives will not be endangered by those with opposing agendas, whether they are Americans or not, and our government must make it clear that revealing the identities of these individuals will not be tolerated," says senator Joe Lieberman.

"This legislation will help hold people criminally accountable who endanger these sources of information that are vital to protecting our national security interests."